“The Internet has been really slow…”

Today was a busy day. Today was my cousin Carly’s 14th birthday party and we had a wedding to attend. We made it to everything, had a good time, and didn’t have any major breakdowns with the girls. That is a major accomplishment.

My aunt and uncle have a DSL internet connection with a Linksys wireless router. This is because when it was setup, my cousin CJ lived there too (he has since moved to OSU). There were two computers on their network and they couldn’t have been further apart. One upstairs, one down, etc… Wireless is a perfect solution for them. My dad and Zach set it up, enabled WEP, and made sure there was a good connection.

Well, today they told us that their internet “has been really slow for a LONG time now.” They blamed it on moving the downstairs computer from one room to another. I sat down at the computer to setup Carly’s new 4GB green iPod mini and thought I would inspect the internet slowage while I was there. We got a USB 2.0 card installed and Carly was loading CDs onto her iPod. She was thrilled. Now onto the network.

I inspected and found that the “VanWetten Network” had a very strong signal (5 out of 5 bars). However, that was not the connection they were connected to. They were connected to “home network”, an unsecured wireless network of one of their neighbors. This connection only had two of five bars and was intermittent. I couldn’t help from laughing as I changed the order of preferred networks back how it should be. This was a first for me. I had heard of people mooching off of their neighbor’s internet connection to avoid paying for service, but to be connected (for weeks if not months) without knowing and still paying for a DSL line, that was a first.

We finally pinned it to a power outage that happened a long time ago. The computer must have been turned on before the router was brought back online and it simply searched for a wireless network within range and connected. Somehow that new connection was made the default connection. Anyone else have fun storied like that to share? I am still chuckling about this one and I have a feeling I will be for awhile.